paxvictoriana: docksandmarinas: A cartoon about cholera in the English magazine Fun, 1866, about 1

paxvictoriana:

docksandmarinas:

A cartoon about cholera in the English magazine Fun, 1866, about 12 years after John Snow published his research showing a link between cholera and contaminated water. The skeleton is ‘King Cholera.’

As the entry on John Snow (1813-1858) describes on the BBC Science site:

At the time, it was assumed that cholera was airborne. However, Snow did not accept this ‘miasma’ (bad air) theory, arguing that in fact entered the body through the mouth. He published his ideas in an essay ‘On the Mode of Communication of Cholera’ in 1849. A few years later, Snow was able to prove his theory in dramatic circumstances. […] After careful investigation, including plotting cases of cholera on a map of the area, Snow was able to identify a water pump in Broad (now Broadwick) Street as the source of the disease. He had the handle of the pump removed, and cases of cholera immediately began to diminish. However, Snow’s ‘germ’ theory of disease was not widely accepted until the 1860s.

Snow was also a pioneer in the field of anaesthetics.

Dr. Pamela K Gilbertdescribes how ‘Between 1832 and 1866, four cholera epidemics struck Great Britain, as part of pandemic outbreaks that affected the entire globe.[…] The 1832 epidemic was the first one to enter Britain—and also spread to the Americas and Australia—and wreaked panic as well as high death rates where it struck.  The 1848 second epidemic was global and caused high death rates in Britain’ (Gilbert, ‘On Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Branch). Gilbert notes that, in spite of the impossibility of finding concrete records for the number dead due to cholera, after just the 1848-9 epidemic was ‘believed [to have lead to] 55,181 deaths had occurred from cholera in England alone,besides 28,900 from “diarrhoea” (qtd. in Tanner 588)’ (Gilbert, ‘On Cholera’).

Interestingly, much of the discussion about the spread — and indeed causes — of cholera epidemics in Britain became intertwined with discussions of CLASS, as poor urban areas with little to no sanitation in their water or food were prone to outbreaks. (For more, see Gilbert, ‘On Cholera’.)

For more on John Snow, see the Science Museum’s page; on the science of cholera and 19th-cen. reactions, public and professional, see Harvard, ‘Cholera Epidemics in the 19th-century’.